Resistance fighter recalls 'the best day of my life'

André Heintz remembers June 6, 1944, as the most beautiful day of his life, though death and destruction reigned all around him.

"We were waiting, waiting, all the time waiting," says M Heintz, a dapper figure with the impeccable English one would expect of a language teacher.

Before the war he had spent six months at Bristol Grammar School and wrote regularly to his classmates there until the Germans came and cut him and the rest of France off from the world they had known before. By June 1944, he was urgent with a sense of revenge.

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"I was sitting in the cellar of our house. Upstairs my parents and my sister were finishing supper and I was listening to the BBC news on my secret radio.

"It was a crystal set hidden in a can of spinach in case the Germans raided the house. On the evening of June 5, I heard the code words on the news: 'The dice are on the table'. That was our signal that within 24 hours the invasion would begin."

It was a moment he had been waiting for since Hitler's armies blitzkrieged France in 1940.

He had joined the Resistance immediately and one of his first jobs was to report on airfields that were being used by the Luftwaffe to bomb Britain.

"I soon found out that planes from Carpiquet had been bombing Bristol. It made me very sad and at once very angry.

"After the war, I found out that the bombs had fallen away from the docks very often, killing civilians. One of those who died was my best friend, Greenslade."

He struggles in vain to remember the boy's first name. "We all called each other by our surnames. Poor Greenslade. That was sad."

It was for Greenslade and other British chums, as well as for the citizens of Caen that M Heintz ran all the risks which four years of membership of the Resistance would bring. When he heard the radio signal to his unit, it was "as if a new life had dawned for me".

Despite being a key element of an important Resistance unit, M Heintz was no more knowledgeable than the German occupiers. "We did not know where invasion would come and most of us, like the Germans, assumed that it would be further north where the sea is most narrow."

M Heintz began to inform members of his Resistance group that they were to begin immediately their campaign of disruption, blowing up railway tracks and bringing down telephone lines.

The 23-year-old was instructed by his own boss that his job would be to remain at home and watch the activities of the German divisional headquarters, which he could see from his bedroom window.

He went dancing that evening, full of excitement with his secret knowledge.

"I desperately wanted to tell my friends that it would be safer for them to leave Caen, because wherever the invasion was, I was sure it would be bombed because of the German headquarters.

"But of course, I could not.

"That night we heard planes, so many planes, overhead, but there were often heavy raids on the railways. The next day, I was watching the German HQ and I heard the bombardment of the coast. Things were happening closer than we thought."

That morning, 87 of his Resistance comrades, some of whom he knew, most strangers to him, were shot by the Gestapo in Caen prison because no trucks were available to transport them east towards Rouen.

M Heintz recognises that today the French have closer relations with Germany than with Britain, but it changes nothing for him.

"People in Normandy feel differently from those in the rest of France. Here, we remember how much we owe to Britain and America. To all the Allies."